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A Role-Based Administrative Model for Administration of Heterogeneous Access Control Policies and its Security Analysis

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Abstract

Over the past few years, several efforts have been made to enable specification and enforcement of flexible and dynamic access control policies using traditional access control (such as role based access control (RBAC), etc.) and attribute based access control (ABAC). Recently, a unified framework, named MPBAC (meta-policy based access control), has been developed to enable specification and enforcement of heterogeneous access control policies such as ABAC, RBAC and a combination of policies (such as ABAC and RBAC). However, one significant limitation is that no complete administrative model has been developed for heterogeneous access control policies. In this article, we present a complete role-based administrative model (named as RAMHAC) for managing heterogeneous access control policies. We also introduce a novel methodology for analyzing heterogeneous access control policies in the presence of RAMHAC by modeling the policies through Datalog facts and using the μ z tool. The administrative model includes a wide range of administrative relations, commands, pre-constraints and post-constraints. A comprehensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the scalability of the proposed approach.

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Acknowledgments

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Science Foundation under awards CNS-1564034, CNS-1624503, CNS-1747728 and the National Institutes of Health under awards R01GM118574 and R35GM134927. The work of Shamik Sural was partially supported by the Fulbright Program. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the agencies funding the research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, Kharagpur, India

    Mahendra Pratap Singh & Shamik Sural

  2. Management Science and Information Systems Department, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NY, USA

    Jaideep Vaidya & Vijayalakshmi Atluri

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  1. Mahendra Pratap Singh
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  2. Shamik Sural
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Appendices

Appendix A: Review of Proposed and Existing Approaches

In this section, we present a comparison of several tools and compare the proposed approach with existing approaches.

As shown in Table 10, Alloy and CPN are used to analyze RBAC policies in presence and absence of ARBAC97 in Schaad and Moffett (2002) and Shafiq et al. (2005), respectively. Jha et al. (2008) present logic programming and model checking based approach to analyze RBAC policies using the administrative model (Sandhu et al., 1999). Stoller et al. (2007) analyze miniRBAC and miniARBAC policies through RBAC-PAT tool. In Jayaraman et al. (2011), the MOHAWK tool is used for analyzing RBAC policies through administrative component URA97. In Alberti et al. (2011b), a tool, named ASASP, is presented for analyzing RBAC policies in the presence of URA97 component of ARBAC97 (Sandhu et al., 1999). Sasturkar et al. (2011) present algorithms to analyze user-role reachability security property of ARBAC97 that is used to manage miniRBAC policies. On the other side, Ferrara et al. (2012) present an approach for analyzing RBAC policies through VAC tool and abstraction technique generally employed in program verification.

Table 9 Comparison of security analysis tools
Full size table
Table 10 Comparison of existing security analysis approaches
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An approach for analyzing the self-administrative RBAC policies is presented in Ferrara et al. (2013) that uses model-checking and abstraction technique generally employed in program verification. In Jha et al. (2014a) and Jha et al. (2014b), security properties of TRBAC are analyzed in the presence of AMTRAC using Alloy and Prolog, respectively. In Mondal et al. (2011), the security properties of GTRBAC (Joshi et al., 2005) is analyzed through model checking based approach. TRBAC (Bertino et al., 2001) reachability security property is verified in the presence of ARBAC (Sandhu et al., 1999) using role and rule schedule strategy in Uzun et al. (2012). In Geepalla et al. (2012), no administrative model is referred to analyze the security properties of STRBAC using Alloy. The security properties of STRBAC using CPN is analyzed in Toahchoodee and Ray (2011).

Appendix B: Preliminaries

This section presents a concise description of the components of RBAC and ABAC and also introduces MPBAC.

1.1 B.1 RBAC (Sandhu et al., 1996)

In RBAC, permission defines a task that users supposed to perform through a role. The role gets permission through role-to-permission association, and a user can acquire a role through user-to-role association. A role can take another role’s permission through role-to-role association. In RBAC, a state is a 3-tuple (UR, RH, RP), where UR, RH and RP represent a set of user-role associations, a set of role-role associations and a set of role-permission associations, respectively.

1.2 B.2 ABAC (Hu et al., 2013)

In ABAC, resources are protected through attributes of users, objects and environment. These attributes can have multiple values. A policy in ABAC is a 4-tuple (UAV, OAV, EC, AC), where UAV, OAV, EC and AC represent a set of user attribute-value assignments, a set of object attribute-value assignments, a set of environmental conditions and a set of access rights, respectively. A state in ABAC is a 4-tuple (UUAV, OOAV, EAC, P), where UUAV, OOAV, EAC and P, respectively, denote a set of user-to-user attribute value assignments, a set of object-to-object attribute value assignments, a set of environmental conditions and a set of policies.

In ABAC as well as RBAC, a state is safe if it does not permit unauthorized access. An administrative user can modify states of ABAC or RBAC, and a modification in any component of an ABAC state (UUAV, OOAV, EAC, P) or an RBAC state (UR, RH, RP) leads to a state change that may transit a system from an authorized state to an unauthorized state. Therefore, to safeguard a system from unauthorized access, it is necessary to analyze the effect of each modification in the presence of the administrative model.

1.3 B.3 MPBAC (Singh et al., 2019b)

In Singh et al. (2019b), an approach is presented to enable specification and enforcement of meta-policy based access control (MPBAC). A meta-policy is defined as a combination of security policies that can contain multiple policies (like ABAC, RBAC) as sub-policies. To evaluate such policy’s outcome, two types of policy result combining approaches (PRCAs) are used: i) allow access if any sub-policy allows access, ii) allow access if all sub-policies allow access. The former approach permits access only when a sub-policy allows access. In contrast, the latter grants access when all sub-policies allow access.

Additionally, to specify and evaluate liberal and strict MPBAC policies, security policies (such as ABAC, RBAC) and PRCAs are grouped into four categories: i) single policy combination and single PRCA, ii) single policy combination and multiple PRCAs, iii) multiple policy combinations and single PRCA, iv) multiple policy combinations and multiple PRCAs.

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Singh, M.P., Sural, S., Vaidya, J. et al. A Role-Based Administrative Model for Administration of Heterogeneous Access Control Policies and its Security Analysis. Inf Syst Front (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-021-10167-z

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